Mortimer Adler on the Cover of Time Magazine, March 17, 1952

I firmly believe that Mortimer Adler is one of the most misunderstood and neglected thinkers of the last one hundred years. Often labeled elitist and Eurocentric, people often confuse his views on education with people like Allen Bloom and Ed Hirsch, who advocate a kind of cultural literacy as a key component of education. On the contrary, I believe Adler’s views on educational reform are deeply democratic and innovative. He was recommending changes to the educational system decades before other more trendy names were found for them. The concepts behind educational buzz words like “critical thinking,” “literature circles,” “project-based learning,” and “inquiry learning” are found throughout Adler’s writings.

Unfortunately for today’s schools, Adler’s work is often buried behind a prejudicial wall of misunderstanding, based on an incomplete and inaccurate picture of what Adler stood for. Adler is often invoked by homeschoolers (another misunderstood group), great books programs and private academies, leading to the false impression that his work is somehow arch-conservative, perennialist or exclusive. To be clear, while I consider Adler one of my intellectual heroes, I don’t agree with everything he proposed, and he sometimes comes across as arrogant. But I think many of his ideas are so important they deserve to be considered by everyone interested in educational reform.

To that end, I’d like to periodically share some of his ideas in his own words, with my occasional comments. Ideally, I’d love to get a conversation going about the reforms he suggests. So please feel free to drop in and leave comments whenever he or I touch a nerve.

To begin with, people often think that because Adler advocated great books programs that he is just another advocate of the “dead white male” approach to literature, whereby reading a limited set of writings gives us the truths of the universe. But as he explains below in his introduction to Reforming Education, this is not his idea of reading great books at all:

Some basic truths are to be found in the great books, but many more errors will also be found there, because a plurality of errors is always to be found for every single truth. One way of discovering this is to detect the contradictions that can be found in the books of every great author. Being human works, they are seldom free from contradictions. Skill in reading and thinking is required to find them. But, given that skill, finding contradictions in a book puts one on the highroad in the pursuit of truth. The truth must lie on one or the other side of every contradiction. It is there for us to detect when we are able to resolve the contradiction in favor of one side or the other….

The difference between [Leo] Strauss’ method of reading and and teaching the great books and the method that [Robert] Hutchins and I had adopted…lies in the distinction between a doctrinal and a dialectical approach. The doctrinal method is an attempt to read as much truth as possible (and no errors) into the work of a particular author, usually devising a special interpretation, or by discovering the special secret of an author’s intentions. This method may have some merit in the graduate school where students aim to acquire narrowly specialized scholarship about a particular author. But it is the opposite of the right method to be used in conducting great books seminars in schools and colleges where the aim is learning to think and the pursuit of truth.

A “dialectical approach” where the aim is “learning to think and the pursuit of truth.” In reading classrooms across America something very similar to this is done under the title “Literature Circles.” If more teachers read Adler’s ideas of how to conduct a seminar with students, the level of thinking in literature circles would skyrocket. In any case, I think it’s clear that Adler is less interested in a cultural language that everyone speaks than he is interested in true dialogue about important ideas. Of course, some people will deny his assumption that objective truth exists at all, but perhaps that’s something we can take up at a later date. At this point, I’m simply interested in clarifying what Adler’s intentions were in promoting the use of great books in education.

Some might wonder what Adler means by “great books.” In an entertaining essay called “The Great Books of 2066” Adler lists seven characteristics:

1. Great books are original communications. Their authors are communicating what they themselves have discovered, not repeating what they have learned by reading the books of other men.
2. Great books have intellectual amplitude; each draws light from and throws light on a large number and variety of ideas, all of them basic.
3. Great books are universally relevant and always contemporary; that is, they deal with the common problems of thought and action that confront men in every age and every clime.
4. Great books are the only books that may be deemed indispensable, every one of them, to a genuine, sound liberal education.
5. Great books are the only books that never have to be written again — that do so well what they set out to do that they cannot be improved upon. (For this simple but penetrating statement about the nature of a great book, I am grateful to my friend Carl Van Doren.)
6. Great books are inexhaustible; they are indefinitely reread-able, each time with additional profit; understandable to some degree on the first reading, they continue to deepen our understanding every time we reread them, and we can never exhaust their power to enlighten us; no matter how many times we read them, there is always more for us to understand.
7. Great books are addressed to human beings, not to some special group of students, scholars or experts; they are seldom written by professors and, if they are, they are never written exclusively for professors.

I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have on Mortimer Adler and/or his ideas, especially as they relate to teaching.

Cross-posted at One Catholic Life.

Eyercize is a free online tool that may be able to help struggling readers increase their reading rate. The following screencast demonstrates some of Eyercize’s basic functions:

As the Save the Words website expresses it:

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted.

Today 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words.

You can change all that. Help save the words!

When you adopt a word, you make a solemn vow: “I hereby promise to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to very best of my ability.”

This would be a clever and fun way to get students playing with words. After they adopt a word students could use it in a poem, in their daily work, or in class discussions.

How would you use this site in your classroom?

Courage?

Yes, courage.  I am a control freak and an introvert, two qualities which seem diametrically opposed to running a writing workshop.  Managing twenty-one students as they work independently on various digital creations gives me a lot of anxiety.  However, I am determined to give students the same chance to develop as writers as I give them as readers.  Just as I allow students the freedom to choose their own books to read, I will allow students to find their own topics, genres and  voices in which to write. Incorporating technology on a daily basis will enhance students’ abilities to become content creators for the 21st century.

These are the professional resources I have at my disposal for planning and implementing the digital writing workshop:

• Troy Hicks’ book The Digital Writing Workshop – I was in the middle of planning the workshop when I heard about this book, so I ordered it immediately; it should be here in a few days.
• The Digital Writing Workshop Ning Group
• My Twitter personal learning network – please feel free to join and share your experiences with me
• The educational blogs I follow via Google Reader (see the list in the right sidebar)
• And my favorite books on writing workshops in general:
  • In the Middle by Nancie Atwell
  • Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi
  • How’s It Going by Carl Anderson
  • Assessing Writers by Carl Anderson

The students will have access to the following technology:

• Each student will be working on a 13″ Macbook with iWork and iLife.
• The class has one digital camera and one digital video camera.
• I have a Zoom H2 portable digital recorder that students can use if they need it.
• Students also have access to blogs, wikis and the school YouTube account.

Wish me luck, and please share your thoughts, advice and resources with me.

Both experiences revolved around the word passion (a rather appropriate concept in the days leading up to Easter), and in the wake of the visionary ideas that were sparking across the electrons of the web yesterday, several thoughts came to me that I wanted to put into written words for better self-clarification. Maybe they’ll resonate with you, too.

Passion Involves Suffering

As Sam Schechner explains, the word passion comes from the Latin passio which means suffering. Several teachers in yesterday’s discussions lamented the way they get treated when they exhibit passion. This suffering is fairly common in people who express their strong feelings for a particular cause or ideal.  There is an energy and force to passion that can intimidate and/or startle people.

But there is more to the suffering of passion than just the reaction of intimidated acquaintances. Our passions arise from deep within us, from longings deep within our hearts. As a religious man, I understand this longing as ultimately a longing for God, and my passion as simply the way I attempt to find unity with the Person that is ultimate truth, goodness and beauty. This longing drives me and haunts me, and when I try to bury it or ignore it, I experience pain.

This is why we teachers must help students get in touch with the deepest longings of their hearts–to encounter the infinite desires within themselves and attempt to quench them. Anything short of this endeavor is a tragic disservice to students.

Passion Is Inherently Unquenchable

Ironically, we also experience pain when we try to satisfy our longings. No matter how successful we are in following our passions, we are never fully satisfied. Ask anyone who has completed a bachelor’s degree, or been recognized with a teaching award, for instance. The passion remains, and in some cases grows more intense with the realization that progress is beginning to be made.

Our students need to know that the skills, knowledge and connections they learn in school are merely the building blocks of living a passionate life. Each student must be encouraged to have the heart of a learner. No–that’s not quite accurate. Rather, each student must recognize that he or she is already hard-wired with the heart of a learner, and that school is the place to develop and nurture that heart.

We teachers must embrace this reality with our entire being, Maybe that means doing away with grades and trusting to a student’s innate desire to learn, as Joe Bower suggests. Maybe it means offering students more autonomy in activities like writing workshop or independent reading. In any case, students will begin to quench their unquenchable desires with or without our help. We can work with them or against them.

Passion Is the Key

We have a tendency to call things passions that really are not. We say things like, “Education is my passion,” or “I have a passion for books.” At best, those expressions are shorthand for, “Education is what gives my life meaning,” and “Books are a significant way I make sense of the world.”

Our objects of passion are not the same thing as our passion. Passion is one’s inner fire for truth, goodness and beauty, seeking to be shared with others. It is a burning within us, a fire in our hearts that we want to share with the world.

And therein lies the secret of teaching.

If we share our passion with students, then their fires will begin to burn all the more fiercely. Bitter, fatigued teachers cannot be effective fans for the flames of passion in students. Teachers who have lost the meaning of their lives are hard pressed to help students find meaning in their lives. We, too, must continue the lifelong joy of trying to quench the unquenchable fire, of nurturing the heart of a learner within ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.”

Are we awakening our students or putting them to sleep?

Follow Up with These Books:

• The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly
• The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer
• The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser

If you’ve struggled to explain to students why Wikipedia is not a reliable source, Mark Moran at FindingDulcinea has written The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely on Wikipedia.  Among his points:

• You can’t rely on something when you don’t know who wrote it.
• Sometimes vandals create malicious entries that go uncorrected for months.
• There is little diversity among editors.

I wish I would have had Moran’s article about four weeks ago when my eighth graders were deep into the research portion of their I-Search projects. I will certainly be using it next year.

The list is a must-read for anyone teaching research skills at the junior high or high school level.  And don’t miss FindingDulcinea’s guide to Wikipedia in the Classroom.

Megan Pavelich

Megan Palevich of Middle School 101 has a must-see project for teachers who want to tap into students’ use of social networking to bring literary or historical people to life. Students create fake Facebook, Twitter and instant message interactions between characters or historical people. Everything is done with templates that students work on in class or at home, so there’s no need for them to actually log in to the social networking sites. It’s an innovative, motivating idea, and one that students are sure to love.

The original instructions are posted as a Google Document here, so be sure to check it out and let her know how you like it.

Thanks to Kelly Tenkely’s Stories of Learning blog for posting the article that introduced me to the project.

What a great way to bring literature to life in the classroom!  Watch a few of the videos and let us know which ones are your favorites by leaving a comment.

They had a little professional help, but what a great idea! Leave a comment if you know of similar videos promoting reading and I’ll update this post by embedding them below.